County has the highest privation rate of any rural area in the State
If you want to see the effect of emigration from Donegal you need only go to church at Christmastime, says Caoimhín MacAoidh, chief executive of the Donegal Local Development Company.
“If you go in February or November you’re going to find a sparsely populated chapel and . . . everybody’s head is grey. If you go to midnight Mass the place is jammed and it’s people in their 20s, in their 30s, in their 40s. These are people coming home. They are coming home to see their families . . . because they’ve had to leave.”
Most Donegal people will recognise the corollary between the anecdote and statistics contained in the 2011 Pobal HP Deprivation Index which uses census data to map deprivation.
The index, which maps affluence and deprivation was developed by Trutz Haase and Jonathan Pratschke. It uses a series of 10 indicators to measure affluence or deprivation. These include population growth, education levels, housing, employment and social status.
Affluent areas
The index shows that Co Donegal has the highest rural deprivation rate in the State and is otherwise surpassed only by Limerick city. Affluent areas across the county are restricted to a few pockets, mainly suburbs around the county’s largest town, Letterkenny.
Analysing the data for Donegal, Haase says that “clear levels of deprivation” are evident.
The index takes into account the effect of outward migration, using an age-dependency ratio, in other words the proportion of people aged over 64 and under 15 in the overall population. It also looks at the percentage of the population who have attained only a primary school education.
High percentages of either of these two measures indicate that younger, better educated and higher skilled individuals have left to avail of job opportunities elsewhere, leaving in their wake a higher proportion of elderly people.
Both factors are reflected strongly in Donegal: in 2011 26 per cent of the resident population had a primary school education only, way above the national average of 16 per cent, and the highest in the country.
Donegal also has the second highest age-dependency ratio in the country (just marginally behind Leitrim) at 36.3 per cent, another measure which Haase says is a clear indicator of “brain drain”.
“This is the disastrous effect of the selectivity of emigration. It’s both a reflection of the age composition and the fact that the active working age cohort and better educated have left.”
Economic contraction
Among those who remain, unemployment is also extremely high, with a 31.4 per cent male unemployment rate (the second highest rate in the country after Limerick city) at the time of the 2011 census.
The only silver lining is that because the county’s fortunes did not expand to the same extent as in the rest of the country during the Celtic Tiger boom, the subsequent economic contraction was not as severe in the past five years.
Donegal’s position as the country’s most deprived rural area comes as no surprise to MacAoidh: “In February I will have been 17 years with the Donegal Local Development Company and in those 17 years I have never seen Donegal come in any kind of socio-economic deprivation statistics other than in last place . . . If you are consistently on the floor that tells you can never get up.
“What you wind up with is young people leaving in massive emigration, industrial-strength quantities. And you end up with an aged, overdependent and often under-educated population.”
Left behind
MacAoidh says the sense the county has been left behind by successive governments has caused anger and frustration among the population.
“The fact of the matter is development is strategically driven from the highest level . . . it is well known in development circles that, for generations, there has been a Dublin-Galway line. There are two Ireland’s in the Republic, there are two very specific Irelands – north of that line and south of that line.”
MacAoidh says that, while some examples of foreign direct investment, such as the Fruit of the Loom factory in Buncrana (which has since closed) did come to the county, he adds that “they didn’t exist in any strategic and numerical scale as it did south of the Dublin-Galway line”.
The county lacks the level of direct investment required to develop a stable rural population.
‘Trojan workers’
“That is what incentives are about and I honestly don’t believe that enough effort was made . . . and I’m pessimistic for the future – not because of the local development actors in Donegal, those people are Trojan workers.
“I am pessimistic because it will now be harder to get that focus and concentrated support in Donegal in the next decade.
“If there is balanced development, investment in Donegal, I don’t see why we would fail while others have succeeded. There is no inherent difference . . . If we got the same fair shake that the south of the Galway-Dublin line got during the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, I don’t think we would have made any worse of a job than anyone else has. And we might have actually done better.”
MacAoidh rejects those who accuse Donegal of whinging or putting on the poor mouth.
“If it is based on absolute hard fact, that you didn’t get a fair deal, then forget calling it a whinge, let’s just recognise that you didn’t get a fair deal.”